URGENT ARCHIVES, October 5, 2022. Photo: Henry Chan.
What does it mean to be one of the few who remembers? What are the stories carried in activists’ archives? How can the effects of protest be stewarded, animated, and reactivated? In this public discussion, activists and scholars Zoë Dodd, Theodore (ted) Kerr, and Anu Radha Verma will share archival objects from their personal collections and tactics related to their work within the overdose response, HIV/AIDS movements, and queer community-building. Throughout the event, audience members will be invited to think about their own personal archive and the way the ongoing and related crises of overdose related deaths and HIV impact their understanding of themselves, history, and the future. Everyone is welcome.
Oct 05, 2022 – Oct 05, 2022
Past
URGENT ARCHIVES
A Show and Tell with Zoë Dodd, Theodore (ted) Kerr, and Anu Radha Verma
Daniels Faculty room 230, University of Toronto St. George campus, 1 Spadina Crescent
Zoë Dodd is a long-time harm reduction worker, advocate, organizer, and scholar. She is currently the inaugural Community Scholar at MAP Centre for Urban Health Solutions at St. Michael’s Hospital. For the last two decades her work has focused on issues related to hepatitis C, HIV, drug policy, poverty, and overdose. She has been instrumental in addressing the overdose crisis, which has taken the lives of thousands of people in Canada. She is the recipient of many awards, is engaged with several research projects, and has a Master’s from York University in the Faculty of Environmental and Urban Change.
Theodore (ted) Kerr is a Canadian born, Brooklyn based writer and organizer. For the US's National Library of Medicine he curated, A People's History of Pandemic: AIDS, Posters, and Stories of Public Health. He edited an On Curating issue entitled, What You Don't Know About AIDS Could Fill a Museum. He is a founding member of What Would an HIV Doula Do? With Alexandra Juhasz, he co-wrote the book, We Are Having This Conversation Now: The Times of AIDS Cultural Production (Duke University Press, 2022).
Anu Radha Verma (she/her) is a community researcher, an independent curator, a consultant, a radio host, and generally, an agitator. She is committed to the suburbs as a place of brilliance and complexity, and organizes with QTBIPOC Sauga, a grassroots gathering for queer and trans, Black, Indigenous and people of colour communities from across Peel. Anu Radha has an MES, where she focused on histories of “south asian” queer and trans organizing from the 1990s onwards. She's worked in India and Canada, committed to social justice through work with youth, 2SLGBTQ+ communities, survivors of gender-based violence, artists, and more. Anu is a queer, diasporic, cis woman of colour, a survivor, neurodivergent and mad-identified.
The Blackwood gratefully acknowledges support for WISH YOU WERE HERE, WISH HERE WAS BETTER from the Canada Council for the Arts, the Jackman Humanities Institute Program for the Arts, the Ontario Arts Council, and the University of Toronto Mississauga.
The Blackwood
University of Toronto Mississauga
3359 Mississauga Road
Mississauga, ON L5L 1C6
[email protected]
(905) 828-3789
The galleries are currently open. Hours of operation: Monday–Saturday, 12–5pm, Wednesdays until 8pm.
